Personal care products are well known and widely used. These products have long been employed to cleanse and moisturize, deliver actives, hide imperfections and to reduce the oiliness and shine on keratinous surfaces. Personal care products have also been used to alter the color and appearance of skin and hair. A variety of personal-care compositions are available to provide skin care benefits and to counteract what many consider undesirable “signs of skin aging,” such as fine lines, wrinkles, and uneven skin texture. Of these benefits, the look and feel of human skin are arguably the two most important and desired effects by consumers.
Many products are designed to improve the look of human skin and many products are directed to improving the feel. Traditionally, a wide variety of different functional materials are combined in a single skin care product in an attempt to deliver a range of benefits to consumers. For example, a typical skin care product might contain:
humectants and other skin actives to improve the condition and health of the skin; emollients to lubricate the skin; and a wide variety of powders to provide a skin feel and immediate skin appearance benefit. But combining compositions into one product often has difficulties.
Moreover, products that deliver one benefit are generally intended as a single application product. Layering many products on the skin that deliver different benefits, but are intended to be used individually, may have the same drawbacks and complications as mixing too many ingredients in one composition. Hence there is a need for products and regimens that deliver multiple benefits, in different compositions, but are designed to be used together in a coordinated regimen.
For example, particulate material can be added to consumer products for a variety of reasons such as to improve the skin feel of the product. Particulate materials also may provide an immediate visible benefit to the skin by diffusely reflecting light, which provides a matting effect to the skin. However, many particulate materials are added to act as an opacifying agent, which effectively turns the consumer product into make-up or make-up like product. The acute and chronic benefits of personal care compositions having opacifying agents are often lost on the user who only appreciates the masking effect the opacifying agents provide. Examples of these include high refractive index pigments, such as titanium dioxide and iron oxides, to provide skin color benefits.
Micronized or spherical polymer particles are used to provide feel and visible texture, wrinkle reduction benefits. For these materials, however, there are tradeoffs if one attempts to increase these feel and look benefits. Using high levels of powder typically lead to products that are hard to spread on skin, and that lose their look benefits over time. These products typically become noticeably white and can flake off the skin.
Likewise, humectants provide a multitude of skin health and appearance benefits, such as: increasing skin translucency, as evidenced by less surface scattering and reducing refractive index gradients in the stratum corneum; reducing visible texture, that is, plumping of the stratum corneum; and generally better functioning and stronger skin. Glycerin is the most efficient humectant available due to its chemical structure. But glycerin is a very thick, sticky material and high levels of glycerin can feel very sticky and heavy on the skin. Moreover, high levels of glycerin on the skin can make it look very shiny and greasy, given that glycerin is slow to absorb into the skin.
Therefore, a need exists for personal care compositions with a high percentage of a particulate material having a low refractive index that can be applied on top of one or more personal care compositions that contain high levels of humectants. This layering effect avoids the drawbacks of combining an “all-in-one” composition, and the drawbacks of layering products not designed to be used together. That is, separating a product in a specific way into two or more layers and applying those layers to skin in a specific sequence, skin feel and skin appearance benefits can be greatly enhanced. More specifically, there exists a need for a regimen and multi layer products comprising an aqueous layer with the product's humectants and skin actives first, and an aqueous layer containing the product's powders last.